Call me paranoid, but I feel there's more going on than being offended. Some freshmen students might actually be special snowflakes, but policing speech is also a tool of power for people who will never touch a power tool. Have you noticed that social justice warriors love to take offense on behalf of minorities they don't belong to? Or minorities they technically belong to, like a rich white Latina Women's Studies major who calls herself a person of color in order to score oppression points. (Try explaining to a Chinese immigrant that you can't call a PoC a colored person.)
On the other side, conservatives are freaking out about freeze peach because shaming people for using dirty words was their tactic, and now libruls have stolen it from them. Millions of Americans are upset that you can't use the word faggot on TV anymore, while they'd be shocked if someone said cocksucker, which would be obscene.